OpenClaw Digest: Enhancing Telegram Reliability, xAI Integration, and CLI Stability

Merged PRs

• [Feat] Attribute ACPX startup probe cost in restart traces (Original PR)
• fix(codex): keep OpenClaw session spawn searchable (Original PR)
• fix(telegram): redact raw update logs (Original PR)
• test: cover gateway exec approval runtime flow (Original PR)
• fix(qa): report rtt and gateway memory metrics (Original PR)
• infra: prefer OPENCLAW_IMAGE_APT_PACKAGES over OPENCLAW_DOCKER_APT_PACKAGES (Original PR)
• Fix approval runtime gateway calls (Original PR)
• Fix Telegram hot reload polling restarts (Original PR)
• fix(telegram): retry 421 misdirected request responses (Original PR)
• fix(github-copilot): sanitize unsafe reasoning replay ids (Original PR)
• fix(doctor): archive legacy clawd browser profile residue (Original PR)
• fix(codex): surface declined native tool replies (Original PR)
• ci: skip changelog-only workflow runs (Original PR)
• fix: harden clawpatch-reported edge cases (Original PR)
• chore(labels): cool label palette (Original PR)
• fix(telegram): fail closed on missing topic threads (Original PR)
• xai: OAuth login fixes plus openclaw User-Agent attribution (Original PR)
• fix(migrate): count hidden config conflicts in preview (Original PR)
• fix(update): require integer timeout values (Original PR)
• test(channels): preserve thread origin contracts (Original PR)
• fix(telegram): preserve forum topic origin targets (Original PR)
• Fix transcript-only assistant rows in latest reply lookup (Original PR)
• chore(labels): add label color sync policy (Original PR)
• fix(cron): suppress source replies for announce delivery (Original PR)
• [codex] test one-chunk progress/final payload selection (Original PR)
• fix(cli): keep subcommand help lightweight (Original PR)

Key Changes

Telegram Channel Hardening

Several critical updates were merged to improve the reliability of the Telegram integration, specifically regarding forum topics and message delivery:

• Forum Topic Routing: Fixed a bug where follow-up deliveries in forum topics lost their context, flattening the OriginatingTo target back to the base chat. Routing now preserves topic-qualified targets (e.g., telegram:<chatId>:topic:<threadId>).
• Fail-Closed Topic Behavior: Removed a destructive fallback that stripped message_thread_id and resent messages to the base chat when a topic thread was not found. The system now fails closed for safer topic behavior.
• Hot Reload Stability: Fixed a critical issue where Telegram ingress workers would exit with code 1 during config hot reloads, wedging the channel and requiring a full gateway restart.
• Transport Reliability: Added retry logic for HTTP 421 "Misdirected Request" responses, treating them as transient transport failures to prevent silent message drops.
• Privacy & Logging: Implemented redaction for raw update logs to prevent private user/chat identifiers and message text from leaking into gateway logs.

xAI Integration Overhaul

PR #83322 brings significant improvements to the xAI (Grok) integration:

• OAuth Flow Fixes: Resolved issues where the loopback callback was torn down by CORS preflight requests, and ensured that OAuth-only users are correctly identified as configured for TTS and STT services.
• Video Generation: Fixed a "response malformed" error by updating the poll-status validation to match xAI's actual API behavior (supporting statuses like submitted and in_progress).
• Attribution Policy: Implemented a User-Agent: openclaw/<version> header for native hosts while ensuring this identity is withheld when using custom proxies to maintain privacy.

CLI and Infrastructure Stability

• Lightweight Help: To prevent segmentation faults in rootless Podman/Fedora environments, subcommand --help paths (e.g., gateway --help) now use lazy action imports. This prevents the loading of heavy native modules during simple help requests.
• Container UX: Introduced OPENCLAW_IMAGE_APT_PACKAGES as a runtime-agnostic alternative to OPENCLAW_DOCKER_APT_PACKAGES for image builds.
• CI Optimization: Updated GitHub Actions to skip broad CI and workflow sanity runs for PRs that only modify CHANGELOG.md.

Agent and Plugin Refinements

• Copilot Replay: Fixed a regression in GitHub Copilot native Responses where overlong reasoning.id values caused schema rejections. The adapter now sanitizes these IDs at the provider boundary.
• Codex Native Tools: Fixed an issue where declined native tool executions resulted in silent non-responses in external channels by ensuring these failures are surfaced as visible error payloads.
• Cron Delivery: Suppressed automatic visible source replies for cron announce turns to prevent duplicate postings in Discord channels.

Impact

These changes collectively address several high-severity pain points. For Telegram users, the experience in forum topics is now significantly more stable, with a lower risk of misplaced replies or silent channel failures during configuration changes. xAI subscribers can now fully utilize OAuth for a wider range of features, including functional video generation and voice services.

From a developer and operator perspective, the CLI is now more robust across different Linux distributions and container runtimes, specifically eliminating crash-loops during help invocations. Additionally, the hardening of plugin activation policies and the sanitization of provider-specific replay IDs ensure that agent sessions are more resilient to provider-side schema changes and internal state corruption.